It’s So Easy

by McKagan, Duff

  As Steven and I crafted our sound as a rhythm section, I got to know him a lot better as a person, too, and quickly realized I couldn’t have asked for a better musical partner or a better friend. I also realized that, as with all the members of the band, what you saw with Steven was not necessarily what you got. Despite his metal-dude hair and the fact that he’d go off and see Leatherwolf shows, he liked nothing more than to listen to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

  One night when we were out together, Steven said to me, “You know, all I want in life is to make enough money one day so I can have a bag of good weed and a big ball of crack around—all the time.”

  I laughed.

  “We’ll never make that kind of money,” I said.

  And besides, I thought to myself, if we ever do, you’ll look back at that dream as nothing more than a teenage joke.

  The Seattle road trip marked the start of a period of almost round-the-clock interaction between us five Guns members. We would go see bands together, play acoustic guitars together, learn to play as a unit, work on songs together, and post flyers together for the increasing number of gigs we started to book. Of course, we got into a ton of mischief together, too, and drew and redrew new lines in the sand as we pushed toward the outer edge of survivable behavior. Sex was blissfully plentiful and carefree; booze and drugs remained inextricably tied to partying, not coping; and rock and roll became the redemptive raison d’être of the next two years of our lives in a way it never had been in any of my other bands and, unfortunately, in a way it would cease to be in Guns a few years later.

  Our social circle soon included a group of recently transplanted New Yorkers who moved out west to—I always suspected—escape legal problems. “Red” Ed, Petey, and Del melded nicely into our lifestyle, which included twenty-four-hour alcohol consumption, scoring any available drugs (I was starting to warm up to various kinds of pills at this point), sundry debaucheries, and plenty of Motörhead, Rolling Stones, and Sly and the Family Stone.

  In addition to Big Jim, I had been corresponding with Eddy since I’d left Seattle, too. It seemed he took my departure as something of a wake-up call. He’d been trying to clean up. He got himself on a methadone plan with the help of his mom. When he got out of a stint in rehab, Eddy’s mom called and asked if he could come down and spend some time with me. She thought it might be a good idea for him to come join me in Hollywood to get away from all of the dealers and junkies up in Seattle.

  Eddy flew down and I picked him up at the airport. Over the next few days I guess I was too busy rehearsing to notice much beyond the work right in front of me. I didn’t pick up on the fact that Ed had gone off methadone and slipped back into a nice heroin run right there in my tiny apartment. It took about four days. Junkies can always find other junkies. And in this case it happened to be our rhythm guitar player that Ed found. I just didn’t think Eddie would put it together so fast. I couldn’t deal with him or his drug use at this point, and I told him that he would have to leave. Over the next few years, horror stories trickled down from Seattle about how strung out Eddy was. I heard that someone Ed knew well was murdered. I heard Ed was on the run. Hearing things like that made me put on my blinders even tighter and forge forward.

  I had been seeing a girl named Kat for a while at that stage, and we decided to move in together. I moved out of Orchid Street to another ground-floor place (they were always the cheapest) on El Cerrito, which I shared with her. The apartment was definitely a move up because of the cross streets: instead of being between Hollywood and Franklin, this building was half a block up the hill from Franklin. Lots of strippers lived on the block, but there were no longer hookers plying their trade outside my window. And I could leave my gear at home without constantly worrying it would get stolen.

  When Kat and I moved in there, I didn’t have much more than a mattress. This little troll of a guy came out as I was moving in and helped me carry the few things I had. His name was West Arkeen, and he lived in the apartment next to ours. Turned out he was one of those guys studying at the Musicians Institute around the corner from my previous apartment. West was one tough motherfucker. He was one funny motherfucker. And he quickly became valuable not only for his friendship but for his song-writing.

  He wasn’t the type of guy who wanted to play in a band, but he was an incredible guitar player. He ended up writing songs with several of us. He had a hand in an unreleased song called “Sentimental Movie,” and in “Yesterdays” and “The Garden,” which eventually turned up on Use Your Illusion. All of those songs were written there on El Cerrito together with various members of our band. West also showed me open-E tuning, an alternative way of tuning a guitar so it plays an E-major chord when strummed with no fingers on the frets. That’s why he got a songwriting credit on “It’s So Easy”—without open-E tuning, that song wouldn’t have happened. I didn’t know alternate tunings existed.

  Kat and I had heard that an eccentric old musician lived above us, but we didn’t care. We weren’t the best neighbors, either, what with Axl, Izzy, Slash, and Steven dropping by, cranking up music all the time, drinking, singing, and strumming with West. But the guy upstairs turned out to be none other than Sly Stone, whose music Steven and I jammed to almost every day, working on our groove. He started to give me cassettes of cracked-out demos he made on a four-track in his apartment. Then he began to use my place as a sort of psychic bomb shelter. It didn’t go over too well with Kat.

  I’d be next door at West’s place, working on some lyrics, and I’d hear her cursing and then she’d scream down the hall.

  “Duff, that motherfucker is smoking crack in our bathroom again!”

  That was one of those pellucid moments in life. I watched the illusions I had about one of my idols evaporate before my eyes. Was the great Sly Stone living the good life, jamming in a home studio tucked away somewhere in his sprawling mansion? Nope, he was sneaking past my girlfriend to smoke crack in my bathroom.

  Our first gig back in L.A. was on June 28, 1985, at the Stardust Ballroom, out east of Highway 101. They had a club night called Scream. It had started as a Goth night; Bauhaus and Christian Death were the most popular acts the DJ played. We were at the bottom of a four-band bill and had to go on stage at 8 p.m. The next show was on the Fourth of July at Madame Wong’s East, a restaurant in Chinatown that hosted a lot of punk-rock shows at night. Guns played second on a four-band bill that night. Only three people showed up for our set, including Kat and West.

  The gig at Madame Wong’s was like many of our first shows in that we were booked alongside punk bands. Early in our career we played shows with Social Distortion, the Dickies, and Fear. I guess at first we must have been perceived as that—punk. But the cool thing about our band, and what set us apart from the beginning, was that we couldn’t be pigeonholed. Sometimes this could work against a band. If you weren’t punk enough for the punk-rock set, or metal enough for the heavy-metal crowd, you risked ending up without gigs. But with the addition of Slash and Steven, we somehow seemed to capture the best of both worlds. In the right setting now, Axl appeared both more punk and more metal than the whole L.A. scene put together.

  The glam scene across town seemed like a private club with some mysterious secret handshake. We got a few gigs with rising glam bands, but it was clearly a mismatch. Rather than treat it as an opportunity to mix things up, insiders in the glam scene made sure to rub our outsider status in our faces. The Sunset Strip scene was all coke and champagne, and we were definitely from a different place. The people who came to those shows were a bit scared by us, too. We meant what we were doing; it wasn’t safe or choreographed or pretend badass in any way. We also went through a period where we played a shit-ton of gigs with Tex & the Horseheads and other cow-punk bands, but we weren’t an easy fit in that scene, either.

  All the while we eyed the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Most bands started there in an opening slot on a Monday or Tuesday night. If and when you began to draw an audience, you
could earn a chance to move up the bill, maybe even to a headlining slot, and you could shift to more desirable days of the week, and finally to weekend gigs. The Troubadour was always packed on weekends. If you could manage to headline there on a Friday or Saturday night, well, that was an indicator of real potential: some weekend headliners got signed to major-label deals out of the all-important “Troub.” For now we were a little too dirty to get even an opening slot on those coveted Friday and Saturday night bills. We would have to start at the bottom and get there on our own.

  One of the staples in our early sets was a tune called “Move to the City,” which was eventually recorded for our Live! Like a Suicide EP. We always heard that song the way it was recorded—with a horn section. And sometimes, even at the smallest venues, where we could barely all fit in the backstage area, we put together a few brass instruments to come onstage for that song. I recruited my brother Matt, who played trombone, to be part of the horn section. The first time he played with us, he looked out from the backstage area and said, “Where is everybody?”

  He was right. Our early gigs were practically empty. Often the few people who were there had come to see the band playing after us. People would throw cigarettes at us and spit on us. Not that it was meant as an I-hate-you thing; people were just rowdy and having fun—that was the way some of the L.A. punk venues were back then. We got used to being treated poorly by everyone—audiences, promoters, clubs, and fellow musicians.

  As soon as Guns began to play regularly in L.A., we started up a phone and mailing list. We obsessively made sure people who came to shows signed up—well, actually, what we did was send stripper friends out into the audience and have them convince people to sign up. Obviously we had to write good songs and play well live to get a bigger audience. On that front I already knew we had the components we needed. But the mailing list really worked for us—within six months we had a thousand names with contact info for each. Other bands had mailing lists, but one of the secrets to GN’R’s success was how much time and effort we spent building and maintaining ours. We knew we had to make it on our own, and after our Seattle road trip, failure was not an option with this crew.

  The established rock clubs in Hollywood at that time had devised a brutal system to ensure themselves against low attendance. By instituting “pay to play,” they shifted the financial risks of the nightclub business downstream to the musicians. A club would require an act to pre-buy, say, thirty tickets at ten dollars a pop. At that point the club didn’t care anymore—their money was already in the can. The band would have to sell those tickets on their own to recoup their money.

  The problem for us was getting together the initial balloon payment. Rich Hollywood parents could loan their kids’ bands money, but we didn’t have that cushion. That’s where Slash’s best friend Marc Canter came in—Marc was the unsung hero of GN’R. Without him, I don’t know how we would have done half the shit we did at the beginning.

  Marc believed in our band from day one. His faith was such that, in addition to photographing us, he was willing to front us the money to buy the tickets that allowed us to get shows in the pay-to-play clubs. We paid him back once we sold the tickets. We were relentless about calling the names on our list. At first we had to hustle really hard just to pay Marc back, but we grew our fan base faster as a result; as our mailing list expanded, it was easier and easier to sell tickets to our shows. Of course, we also had to borrow money from Marc to buy stamps.

  We made cool flyers and, in addition to sending them to people on our list, we posted them all over the city. We always posted flyers as a band, at night. The first time I discovered Night Train wine was on one of these epic nocturnal flyering campaigns—which were best accomplished while drinking from a brown paper bag. Afterward I was happy to find that the liquor store around the corner from our storage space also stocked it. At $1.29 a bottle, Night Train instantly became a band staple; we started piecing together the song “Nightrain” a week later while rehearsing before another flyer-posting outing.

  Soon we decided to rent a makeshift rehearsal space. Even though we would have to come up with a monthly nut of a few hundred bucks, we would save money versus paying by the hour at other rehearsal spaces. (We rehearsed a lot of hours.) We felt we were now on a roll, and scraping the money together at the beginning of each month would allow us a lot more freedom, too: we could leave our gear set up all of the time instead of having to tear it down for the next band the way we had to at the per-hour rehearsal places. Still, given our limited resources, we had to improvise.

  Half a block north of Sunset on Gardner was the mouth of a dead-end alleyway that ran east behind what was then the Guitar Center. Halfway down the alley, the slender lane opened into a tarmac lot behind a public elementary school. Along this lot, there were half a dozen doors to self-storage spaces used for various types of commerce. We found one for rent for four hundred dollars a month and knew it was our spot, though we’d have to fudge a little bit about what we planned to do in there. Once we finally jumped through all of the various hoops presented to us by the apprehensive landlord, we got the keys to our new rehearsal studio.

  If Orchid Street was ground zero of Guns N’ Roses when Axl, Izzy, and I all lived there, the alleyway behind Gardner was where the whole thing came together once we had discovered we were a real band. We set up the garagelike, ten-by-fourteen structure as our gang headquarters—a place to rehearse, party, and, much of the time, to spend the night.

  The storage space itself had a door and unadorned cinder-block walls. There was no bathroom, but for four hundred bucks a month, who expected a bathroom? And anyway, there was a latrine in the parking lot. There was also no a/c or heat, but there was electricity and we could make noise twenty-four hours a day.

  We raided a nearby construction site for some two-by-fours and plywood that we used to install a ramshackle loft in our tiny new home. The loft added some dimension and much-needed sleeping space to the room. If you were to walk in the door, everything in the room would be to your left. First there was my bass amp, then Izzy’s Marshall half stack, then Steven’s drums, and then Slash’s guitar rig. This is also how we would set up onstage for each and every gig until Izzy left in 1991.

  Our gear was all very old and beat-up, with the vinyl covers shredding off the cabinets and all. But in this room our shitty gear sounded magical, clear, and huge. We did not have a PA for Axl, so we basically improvised and made do. There is a photo out there somewhere that shows Axl screaming into my ear at the Gardner space. This was the only way that he could get his ideas across in that setting. Among the benefits of playing shows as frequently as possible was that it offered us our only chance to hear what Axl was singing.

  It was funny having crappy gear and no PA and constantly looking at the back wall and dumpsters of the Hollywood Guitar Center all day. That place was a veritable toy store to those who could pay for the things in there—or had credit with the powers that be. It was like a sick joke to us. By the time we did finally get our record deal and the advance dough that came with it, I knew exactly what new gear I wanted to buy.

  To the right of our space was another one being used by a band called Johnny and the Jaguars. The members had come out together from Denver. The unspoken truth in Hollywood back then was that if a band moved to town from another city as a unit, it never lasted. I suppose all the influences and amusements L.A. offered were just too divisive. You had to wade through a lot of new shit in Hollywood, and your life was going to take some turns. For five guys to experience all those turns at the same time and react in the same way was almost impossible. Sure enough, before long Johnny and the Jaguars broke up. The other thing about bands from out of town? They were usually awful. True to form, Johnny and the Jaguars were not a great band. But they were a nice bunch of guys, and we later tapped their keyboardist, Dizzy Reed, to join our touring band for the Use Your Illusions tour.

  Just across Sunset, in a nondescript row of one-story building
s, stood El Compadre, a cheap Mexican restaurant that served strong margaritas. The interior was kept so dark you couldn’t see a thing when you stepped inside. You had to wait for your eyes to adjust before a dark bar appeared on the left and even darker vinyl banquettes and booths slowly swam into view on the right. No matter how long you let your eyes adjust, sufficient murkiness remained to allow for discreet blow jobs and drug use right at the booths. The Seventh Veil strip club was a few blocks down Sunset from El Compadre. The important thing about the Seventh Veil was the girls. That might sound obvious. But to us it was the girls, not the show and the venue. We spent a lot of time with off-work strippers, and a few began to dance onstage at our concerts.

  Between us and the other bands, the alley began to attract a lot of drugs, booze, girls, and other musicians. Strippers from the neighborhood constantly came by the space, often bringing quaaludes, Valium, coke, or booze to share. I still avoided blow because of the effect I assumed it would have on my panic attacks, but to pills I didn’t always say no. As we started to play more gigs and met more people, word spread about our alleyway and it became a go-to after-hours party spot. This translated into more people hanging around the fringes of our scene. Among them was a guy named Phillipe, who drove a bus for the city as his regular job but sold crack on the side. He was older than we were. Phillipe was not a rocker per se, but he liked the fact that there were hot young girls around. He got them high and tried to take advantage of them—creepy stuff. He was emblematic of a certain element that orbited our band.

  As more and more people showed up to party in our alley after the clubs closed on Friday and Saturday nights, we also started to sell beer by the can. We could buy cases of rotgut beer for $5.99—which was only twenty-five cents a can. We sold them for a buck a pop. That translated into major income, at least by our standards. Shit, we could make the rent on our space with income like that.